Category Archives: foreclosure

Less than a month ago Governor Schwarzenegger visited the home of the homeless in Tent City Sacremento. His visit came on the heels of Lisa Ling’s coverage of Tent City on Oprah. Now the residents have been given eviction notices to vacate by Wednesday despite many thinking that Schwarzenegger was there to help them. Those who refuse to leave will be arrested.

Tent Cities in America: A Lisa Ling Special Report On Oprah

Schwarzenegger Visits Sacramento’s ‘Tent City’

How Do People End Up In Tent City?

The next video is from iCare-America, a project to help those who are homeless. It was started by a man who lost his home due to the economy.

There is an old adage on Wall Street that no one rings a bell at major market tops or bottoms. That may be true in normal times, but as many have noticed, we are now completely through the looking glass. In this parallel reality, Ben Bernanke has just rung the loudest bell ever heard in the foreign exchange and government debt markets. Investors who ignore the clanging do so at their own peril. The bell’s reverberations will be felt by everyday Americans, whose lives are about to change in ways few can imagine. While nearly every facet of America’s economy has been devastated over the past six months, our national currency has thus far skipped through the carnage with nary a scratch. Ironically, the U.S dollar has been the beneficiary of the global economic crises which the United States set in motion. As a result, our economy has thus far been spared the full force of the storm.

This week the Federal Reserve finally made clear what should have been obvious for some time – the only weapon that the Fed is willing to use to fight the economic downturn is a continuing torrent of pure, undiluted, inflation. The announcement should be seen as a game changer that redirects the fury of the financial storm directly onto our shores.

In its statement, the Fed announced its intention to purchase an additional $1 trillion worth of U.S. treasury and agency debt. The purchases, of course, will be made with money created out of thin air through the Fed’s printing presses. Few can doubt that they will persist with these operations until the economy returns to its former health. Whether or not this can ever be accomplished with a printing press alone has never been seriously considered. Bernanke himself admits that we are in uncharted waters, with no map or compass, just simply a hope that more dollars are the answer. Full Story

Comedian Jon Stewart and financial commentator Jim Cramer squared off on Thursday night over the CNBC TV network’s reporting of Wall Street ahead of the market meltdown, and Cramer conceded he — and others — gave some bad advice.

In recent days on his mock news program “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” the funnyman has taken Cramer, host of CNBC’s “Mad Money,” to task by saying he and CNBC reporters befriended Wall Street executives and former government officials instead of questioning them as journalists should.

Cramer, who offers advice and stock market tips on his CNBC show, has fought back, saying Stewart chose only examples of bad advice Cramer had given.

“I think everyone could come in under criticism. We all should have seen it before,” Cramer said. “Everybody got it wrong. I got a lot of things wrong.”

Average people trusted financial advisors who told them to pour money into market-oriented accounts for the long term, Stewart said, and those people lost their money when Wall Street used those savings to generate short-term profits.

Stewart said financial reporters like Cramer and others on CNBC should have taken the time to uncover financial shenanigans and not have been so quick to trust business executives and government officials.

“The financial news industry is not just guilty of a sin of omission but a sin of commission,” Stewart said. Full Story

Americans remain broadly optimistic about their economic prospects in the middle of the most severe recession since World War Two, according to a survey released on Thursday.

The Pew Economic Mobility Project found that despite dismal economic conditions and decades of widening income inequality, Americans still widely believe in the “American Dream”: the idea that success is determined by one’s willingness to work hard, not the circumstances of one’s birth or other external forces.

The nationwide survey of 2,119 adults found that:

* 79 percent said it is still possible to get ahead in the current economy;

* 72 percent said they believed they will personally be better off 10 years from now;

* 74 percent said they were at least somewhat in control of their economic situation, but only 43 percent said that other people were in control;

* 71 percent said personal ambition was a more important determinant of success than external conditions.

But the survey also reflected the worsening economy: only 32 percent rated their own personal circumstances as “excellent” or “good,” down from 52 percent in 2006.

“There is a strong and a uniquely American optimism which is persisting even in the face of these very, very trying times,” said John Morton, the managing director of economic policy at the Pew Charitable Trusts, the nonprofit organization that sponsored the survey, which has a margin of error of 3.4 percentage points.

That optimism is somewhat at odds with the group’s 2008 report, which found that parents’ income is strongly linked to one’s chances to succeed.

The economic crisis that started with junk mortgages in the United States is causing havoc for poorer countries around the world, not only stifling their growth but choking off their access to credit as well, the World Bank said on Sunday.

In a bleaker assessment than those of most private forecasters, the World Bank also predicted that the global economy would shrink in 2009 for the first time since World War II. The bank did not provide a specific estimate, but bank officials said its economists would be publishing one in the next several weeks.

Until now, even extremely pessimistic forecasters have predicted that the global economy would eke out a tiny expansion but had warned that even a growth rate of 5 percent in China would be a disastrous slowdown, given the enormous pressure there to create jobs for its rural population.

The World Bank also warned that global trade would shrink for the first time since 1982, and that the decline would be the biggest since the 1930s.

The report, released on Sunday, was prepared for a meeting next week of finance ministers from the 20 industrialized and large developing countries. It warned that the financial disruptions are all but certain to overwhelm the ability of institutions like itself and the International Monetary Fund to provide a buffer.

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It is Our Responsibility to Examine and Change Society

The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious, one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity. But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around. What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will obey the rules of society. If a society succeeds in this, that society is about to perish. The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine society and try to change it and to fight it - at no matter what risk. -- James Baldwin

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